Killer: a short story by Kougaiji

The real name of this short story is Killer. The name was already taken and I couldn't use it.

Submitted:Oct 7, 2008
Reads: 137
Comments: 1
Likes: 1

Killer

It was hard to hold the stolen knife as he
crouched in the darkness. The blood trickled in runnels over his
hand, some even finding its way into the sleeves of the tight,
black infiltration armour that covered him from head to foot. His
own knife lay embedded in the chest of a young Black Flag
legionnaire two floors up, sunk to the hilt even after being
thrown fifty feet.

As it turned out the flamboyant move had
proven costly as the boys' dying spasms sent a few rounds into
the ceiling. Even now he could hear the approach of squadron 18
and he shook his head in disgust. According to the duty rotas
he'd hacked from Black Flags' database they were supposed to be
patrolling D quadrant until 2:15am, putting them a whole one
hundred and twenty seconds ahead of schedule. Sloppy, very
sloppy.

The killer waited until the squad was
level with him and then exploded from hiding. Two were dead
before they even knew he was there and the remaining four tried
to train their guns on someone who seemed composed of smoke and
liquid shadows. A bladed hand crushed the windpipe of the large
black man on the right even as his elbow shattered the skull of
the girl behind.

Before they dropped the killer had spun
like a dancer between the last two, whipping their knives from
their belts. He moved so fast that they never had time to turn
before the stolen blades sliced into their backs, precisely
between the third and fourth ribs on the right hand side,
puncturing the lung and rendering them incapable of making any
noise.

The whole combat had taken less than sixty
seconds. He reviewed the schematics of the base on his neural net
and moved unerringly toward one of his many boltholes. The killer
was veteran enough to know that once the mission had begun the
only thing you could reliably plan on was the plan going awry at
some point. He moved quickly, confidently through the shadows,
trusting in the refraction optics woven into his armour to keep
him one with the dark and hoping that no one was using thermal
imaging just yet.

He slipped into the storeroom that he had
chosen as his first refuge two weeks ago and crouched behind one
of the many boxes of dried rations. He had assumed that this
store wouldn't be high on their priority list and that only a
small squad would be despatched to check it.

Now he simply had to wait. The base was on
alert, which would make his job more difficult but the killer had
the confidence of a man who had never failed, never been beaten.
He knew he would complete his mission. The thought of
failure never even entered his head. The intruder grinned in the
darkness. Life hadn't always been like this, moving from shadow
to shadow, kill to kill, always behind the barrel of a gun or the
blade of a knife.

Yes, life had indeed been different.
Before the cold metal wombs of the program birthed him a second
time. He grinned again. Life hadn't always been this much fun.
The door hissed open and the killer tensed as he listened to the
footsteps. There was one guard, moving silently, cat-like and
sure. Perfect.

A single blow rendered the unfortunate
legionnaire unconscious and the killer quickly flipped him over
onto his stomach. He pulled another knife from his boot and
sliced through the straps on the guards body armour, then the
uniform below, exposing his back from the neck to the waist. The
killer unclipped a dull black metal tube from around his thigh
and activated the device with a button near its bulbous
head.

It looked like a metal centipede, even
down to the multitude of tiny legs and pincers at the head. A
green LED began to blink on and off and the killer used his knife
again, this time to cut through flesh and expose the guard's
spine. A swift application of cryo-gel stemmed the flow of blood
and the intruder quickly placed the NSO into
position.

That was what the Lab-rats called it,
standing for Neuro-Symbiotic-Override. Everyone else in the
program had promptly christened it the Puppetmaster. As the
Puppetmaster settled into place its pincers shot forward,
penetrating the brain stem and sending nano-filaments up into the
brain itself. The filaments snaked through the Medulla and
insinuated themselves into the cerebral
cortex.

The legs of the Puppetmaster were busily
injecting their own nano-machines into the spine itself. These
would hijack the motor neuron pathways, masquerading as sensory
neuron axons and sending their own messages to the brain. Pain
signals were blocked completely whereas those areas in the
medulla responsible for movement and awareness were boosted
exponentially.

The green LED turned amber and the killer
stepped back as the guard rose smoothly to his feet, through the
door and upwards through the base on his pre-programmed "escape"
effort. The killer moved swiftly, deeper into the complex, down
towards its' heart. He could hear the gunfire above him and, very
faintly, the screams.

Cassandra hadn't changed it seemed. She
wanted the intruder alive for torture and questioning. The
killers' puppet laboured under no such constraints. The killer
soon reached his destination and considered several options
before simply levelling a kick at the steel door that blasted it
from its' hinges. There was an immediate burst of gunfire from
the room but he was safely passed the door, hugging the wall.

He threw a small black disk through the
doorway and waited two seconds for the magnetic suppressor to
activate. This was one of his personal favourites. The suppressor
inhibited the small working parts of automatic weapons, rendering
them useless and forcing his targets to meet him hand to
hand.

The killer entered the room, swiftly
despatching the two guards impotently pulling their triggers. A
vicious left cross lifted the first from his feet, hurling him
into a bank of machines which buckled and sparked in their death
throes. He followed the move round smoothly, turning full circle
to hammer a roundhouse kick into the chest of the second. The wet
snap of his ribs was clearly audible as they drove into his
lungs.

He turned to see the remaining two moving
towards him with perfect, almost choreographed steps. These would
be the best that Black Flag had to offer, bar Cassandra herself.

They didn't even see the blows that swept
inside their guard to drive their shattered nose bones up and
into the brain. The door at the far end of the room opened as
they fell and the mistress of the Black Flag organisation moved
into the room. Cassandra was still beautiful, even through the
fear that twisted her flawless features. There was determination
there as well. The killer knew that alarms were ringing even now
and Cassandra had only to hold him for seconds rather than
minutes.

Viper swift he moved in, not trying to
land a blow but trusting to her own fear to compel her to strike.
Sure enough her fist flashed towards his face, the blow so fast
that the tearing of displaced air could be clearly heard. The
killer swayed backwards, his own hand catching hers in an iron
grip. He twisted her arm as he pulled her towards him so that her
elbow joint faced upwards. The killers other hand cannoned down,
smashing through the bone and tearing the
flesh.

Cassandra was enough a child of the
program that her grunt of pain was barely audible and even as he
crippled her arm she attempted to bring her foot down onto his
instep. The killer twisted away to stand behind her. He grabbed
her hair, bound in a ponytail, and quickly looped it around her
neck, pivoting on one leg at the same time and placing a foot in
the small of her back.

He increased the pressure and reduced her
air supply just enough to take some of the fight out of her. He
stood there in perfect balance, Cassandra's weakening struggles
hardly moving him at all. Then for the first time the killer
spoke. "I will almost miss you Cassandra". Cassandra's eyes
widened as she realised who her executioner was to be and then
his foot drove forward as he wrenched at her hair. Her eyes
widened further as her neck snapped and she fell bonelessly to
the floor.

The killer felt a pang of disappointment
as his quarry fell. Now the mission was over. Now would come the
interminable wait between assignments, the wet embrace of the
bio-gel that held him in dreamless stasis while they probed and
tested, always refining the genetic process, making him stronger
and faster all the time.

These momentary doubts flashed through his
mind in a second, even as he was turning towards Cassandra's
chambers and the escape route he knew she would have there.
Without a backward glance at the corpse of his sister, the killer
faded back into the shadows.